Vodafone ADSL

I have recently moved to a new apartment in Barcelona so I had to "move" also my Internet connection. I have also a Huawei e156 modem with a Simyo SIM card that I use for having Internet while On the Go, so I had no struggle about been without Internet connection at home. In any case, and luckily I must add, the change of ADSL connection from one apartment to the other was not difficult at all. Luckily because when I contacted Tele2 for the change, they informed me about the need to pay around 80? for this change. But, as the product I had, only ADSL connection, without phone, was not available anymore, I had to change the product contracted or... I could finish my contract even though I had a 18 months compulsory contract.
This was the first good news, but then they informed that they had promotion with Vodafone, as Tele2 Spain is now owned by Vodafone Spain, so I could change the service to a more complete pack, with fix phone and a flat rate in fix phone calls, for roughly the same price and without having to pay one euro for the installation, I accepted without doubt.
I started the process beginning February so I was supposed to receive the router around a week after. At the end the shipment was delayed because a shortage of routers (I was informed), so I received the wifi router about a week ago, but one of the most interesting things about the Vodafone solution is that the router comes with two ways of connecting to Internet: Through ADSL but also through HSPA. And the point is that even though I had not ADSL connection yet I could use for a week or so the HSPA connection from my router and with a nice download speed of about 4Mbps.
Now I have the ADSL connection and the speed has been improved to 6Mbps downlink and almost 1Mbps uplink, and the HSPA connection is there as a backup solution in case the ADSL link fails.
So, at the end it took around three weeks to have the ADSL connection up and running again at my new apartment, but the struggle of been without Internet is not a must anymore when moving!

"Wireless" Phone Backup using FTP

One of the most interesting things of Android phones, and specifically my HTC Magic, is the possibility to sync every application with the cloud. My contacts are sync with Google contacts, my email is stored on a IMAP server, the Calendar with Google Calendar... most of my Personal Information is thus in sync. This is great in the case you loose your phone or it is stolen as you can recover most of the information easily and without struggling. The only thing I missed (a bit) was the possibility to sync the contents of my microSD Card. The point is that microSD contents is huge, 8Gb, and thus syncing this with the cloud would have a big impact on maintenance cost in any of the webservices offering this (Amazon S3, mainly).

So, I have opted for a cheaper solution and is to use ftp sync while in my home network. The idea is, once I arrive to my home I usually activate Wifi on my phone for browsing and email reading so just installed an small ftp server on the phone, SwiFTP, that is an Open Source project hosted in Google Code. This ftp must be manually activated and is protected with simple username and password. I expect it to continually grow and, why not, have a simple daemon that detects when are you at your home network and when this happens, just activate the ftp server.

Once the server is up and running on the Android phone the backup system must be set up. I am using my Kubuntu home server as the backup system. Basically I have installed curlFTPFS on the Linux server and just mount the ftp connection to the Android phone as an additional local folder. The backup space is protected with Truecrypt on the computer so I have to mount two different folders, the ftp server on ~/android and the encrypted volume on ~/androidbak. Once these two volumes are mounted I can use the superb rsync linux tool to sync them unattended and keeping only the files in my Android phone.

Next step is to automatize all that stuff as much as possible: Automatically setting up the server when arriving at home and mounting the volumes in the backup system, as well as scheduling the backup to be perform without noticing, maybe at night when charging the phone. But this is something I am still working on and hope soon to get along with it.

The most impressive thing about all that is everything I needed was Open Source and set up in a couple of hours... this is simplification!!!

Finally, Giesecke & Devrient contributes to Android!

Well, after some months of work, G&D has finally gone public on the project that it was developing on Android platform. As can be checked in the press release the contribution consists on code that enables any Android based phone with a microSD card slot (all of them, for the time being) to use a special microSD with a SmartCard embedded on it (check more info about the Mobile Security Card) to deploy security enhanced applications with the use of hardware Security Elements.
But this is only a start point as, it can be checked in this document, several SE may be added in the future... so if you have a good idea or want to work on that project just visit the Google Code page of the Secure Element Evaluation Kit (SEEK)!!

Debugging in Android

The first thing I did after my first steps developing on Android was to change the SPL. The SPL is commonly known as the bootloader, that is, is intended to load the image of the Operative System to the flash memory of the device. I followed the instructions presented in my previous post and updated my HTC Magic (Saphire) with the Engineering SPL 1.33.2010. The original SPL was the one that is shipped on Vodafone Spain Magics, HBOOT-1.33.0004(SAPP10000).

After doing these change I was able even to load Boot images and thus run unsigned images of Android on my HTC. Superb!

Now, what I want to do is to start debugging applications on my HTC. First of all I had to enable App Debugging in the Android Device: On the device, go to the home screen, press MENU, select Applications > Development, then enable USB debugging.

Second, you have to make the application debuggable. To do that, you will have to add the following property to the application element of the manifest.xml:

android:debuggable="true"

Next, just connect the Device to the computer, check with adb that the device is detected, and run the application. It will immediately run the application on your device, it is indeed that easy!

Next step, is to build applications with a custom Image of Android... will come soon!

Developing on Android

Well, who was going to think more than two years ago that I was going to write a post with that title... Finally the time has come and even though there are several places where you can find a how-to guide to develop on Android, I will try to present in the following posts how "I managed" to set up and start developing on Android platform.

My pre-requirements at present are: Windows XP Home SP3 AMD 64bits laptop, a Vodafone Spain HTC Magic and some microSD cards. From this start point first step is to set up the development environment. For that I will follow the following steps:

1. Download SDK
2. Download Eclipse
3. Install Eclipse (unzip folder)
   
4. Start Installation (Slight differences with Galileo release of Eclipse)
5. HelloWorld Application to check that everything is OK

After this 5 steps I have been able to run in the emulator the HelloWorld Application. Now I am going to try to attach the Magic to the Dev Environment. I will follow the steps in this nice how-to for HTC Saphire (Aka Magic):

1. Install the Drivers and HTC Sync Program
   
2. Run "adb devices" command successfully

Next step has been writting a backup of my present Android. To do that I just dowloaded the corresponding recovery ROM (following this instructions): RAv1.2.1H
After downloading I did a fastboot (that is booting from the image in the PC without writing anything to the Flash of the phone) and did the backup, that is stored in the SD card. This backup will be stored for future need to recover ;-)

So, for the moment I am done, I have the possibility to fastboot ROMs in my android. Next steps will be changing the SPL and actually writing new and unsigned ROMs to the flash of the phone!

Android Phone (& Development)

As I introduced several weeks ago, actually before enjoying a two weeks vacation that preceded a period of huge workload and social demands ;-) I have become a convert to Android. It was tough at the beginning to move from Symbian, first the 6120 and afterwards the superb N95, to Android. Actually I still miss the N95 Carl Zeiss lens camera, but the HTC Magic, thanks to Android, is such a versatile device that I usually forget about taking pictures :-/

The point is that I barely used the device that I borrowed from my work for the vacation in the US, mainly because I purchased a T-Mobile pre-paid card that you must know has no data plan, so you can not use it to connect to the Internet from the device. I should have bought a AT&T pre-paid that does have the service. I purchased the SIM in a small bazaar in Broadway, so no complains ;-)
But after been back of this awesome travel around the north-east of the US it was my birthday and I was given an HTC Magic. Nice present!

From that time I started to investigate it and I must say that I'm impressed on how fast is evolving all the stuff related with Android. Thousands of applications just do what you need to do and one of the most interesting things, most of them are for free and not under the strict control of an omnipotent Apple. Of course you have premium versions of some of them, but you have a broad selection of Open Source applications that you may contribute to improve. One of the first things I did is change Gmail client by K-9 client for my IMAP account... and it was so straightforward and well integrated that I almost forgot about Gmail. One of the things I have not found solution yet is a Open Source application to store encrypted notes and sync them with a service in the cloud. Anyhow I will continue trying. One of my dreams is to have a Truecrypt driver for on-the-fly encryption of the microSD. It would be nice to be able to encrypt the information in the microSD and just to unplug it, put it in an adapter connected to a PC and access the sensitive information easily.

In any case the next step is to install a "hacked" build of Android on my HTC. It is a bit tricky but from my early investigations I must say that does not seem impossible. Just hope to have some time in brief to invest some effort and who knows, maybe get an Android build of cupcake supporting STK Menu, feature not included by Vodafone!!

Android Phone

Finally, after talking a little bit about it I have the for the first time a Google phone in my hands.
Some months ago I had a HTC Dream locked to T-Mobile thanks to a friend, but I had no T-Mobile USA enabled SIM card to play with it so I had to be happy with "emulating" one and been able to play with the Wifi connection. I any case it was a nice experience and my first impression was that it was a nice OS, even though the handset was a bit bricky.

Now I have a HTC Magic unlocked phone, even though it is VF Germany branded, to play with it in my two weeks vacation in the States. I plan to acquire a prepaid SIM card and use it to access to Internet while travelling. I will travel also with my N95 but VF Spain roaming rate makes it very difficult to really explode it.
So, hopefully in some weeks I will have a brief report of my experience that I will be able to share here.